Annotations (18)
“In the town near our house there's a shop with a sign warning that the door is hard to close. The sign has been there for several years. To the people in the shop it must seem like this mysterious natural phenomenon that the door sticks, and all they can do is put up a sign warning customers about it. But any carpenter looking at this situation would think 'why don't you just plane off the part that sticks?'”
Psychology & Behavior · Creativity & Innovation
DUR_ENDURING
Expertise sees fixable problems
“Once you're good at some technology, when you look at the world you see dotted outlines around the things that are missing. You start to be able to see both the things that are missing from the technology itself, and all the broken things that could be fixed using it, and each one of these is a potential startup.”
Creativity & Innovation · Psychology & Behavior · Business & Entrepreneurship
DUR_ENDURING
Expertise makes gaps visible
“Strangely enough this is particularly true in countries like the US where undergraduate admissions are done badly. US admissions departments make applicants jump through a lot of arbitrary hoops that have little to do with their intellectual ability. But the more arbitrary a test, the more it becomes a test of mere determination and resourcefulness. And those are the two most important qualities in startup founders.”
Psychology & Behavior · Business & Entrepreneurship
DUR_CONTEXTUAL
Arbitrary tests filter for grit
“If it was obviously a good idea to start Apple or Google or Facebook, someone else would have already done it. That's why the best startups grow out of projects that aren't meant to be startups. You're not trying to start a company. You're just following your instincts about what's interesting. And if you're young and good at technology, then your unconscious instincts about what's interesting are better than your conscious ideas about what would be a good company.”
Business & Entrepreneurship · Psychology & Behavior · Creativity & Innovation
DUR_ENDURING
Instinct beats planning for founders
“I don't think it's the prestigious names of these universities that cause more good startups to come out of them. Nor do I think it's because the quality of the teaching is better. What's driving this is simply the difficulty of getting in. You have to be pretty smart and determined to get into MIT or Cambridge, so if you do manage to get in, you'll find the other students include a lot of smart and determined people.”
Psychology & Behavior · Leadership & Management
DUR_ENDURING
Difficulty of entry filters talent
“The biggest mistake young founders make is to build something for some mysterious group of other people. But if you can make something that you and your friends truly want to use, something your friends aren't just using out of loyalty to you, but would be really sad to lose if you shut it down, then you almost certainly have the germ of a good startup idea.”
Business & Entrepreneurship · Psychology & Behavior · Creativity & Innovation
DUR_ENDURING
Build what you want to use
“So Mark Zuckerberg shows up at Harvard in 2002, and the university still hasn't gotten the facebook online. Each individual house has an online facebook, but there isn't one for the whole university. The university administration has been diligently having meetings about this, and will probably have solved the problem in another decade or so. Most of the students don't consciously notice that anything is wrong. But Mark is a programmer.”
Business & Entrepreneurship · Psychology & Behavior
DUR_ENDURING
Programmer saw obvious fix, built overnight
“The critical distinction is whether you're producing or just consuming. Are you writing computer games, or just playing them? That's the cutoff.”
Creativity & Innovation · Psychology & Behavior
DUR_ENDURING
Production vs consumption defines growth
“If you really want to learn to program, you have to work on your own projects. You learn so much faster that way. Imagine you're writing a game and there's something you want to do in it, and you don't know how. You're going to figure out how a lot faster than you'd learn anything in a class.”
Creativity & Innovation · Psychology & Behavior
DUR_ENDURING
Projects accelerate learning through need
“Larry and Sergey weren't trying to start a company at first. They were just trying to make search better. Before Google, most search engines didn't try to sort the results they gave you in order of importance. If you searched for 'rugby' they just gave you every web page that contained the word 'rugby.' And the web was so small in 1997 that this actually worked! Kind of.”
Business & Entrepreneurship · Technology & Engineering · Creativity & Innovation
DUR_ENDURING
Exponential growth broke old search
“Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, spent time when he was a teenager studying calligraphy, the sort of beautiful writing that you see in medieval manuscripts. No one, including him, thought that this would help him in his career. He was just doing it because he was interested in it. But it turned out to help him a lot.”
Creativity & Innovation · Strategy & Decision Making
DUR_ENDURING
Calligraphy knowledge became Mac advantage
“If you start a startup at 22, and you start writing your own programs now, then by the time you start the company you'll have spent at least 7 years practicing writing code, and you can get pretty good at anything after practicing it for 7 years.”
Creativity & Innovation · Psychology & Behavior
DUR_ENDURING
Seven years of practice creates mastery
“You can do well in computer science classes without ever really learning to program. In fact you can graduate with a degree in computer science from a top university and still not be any good at programming. That's why tech companies all make you take a coding test before they'll hire you, regardless of where you went to university or how well you did there. They know grades and exam results prove nothing.”
Creativity & Innovation · Psychology & Behavior
DUR_ENDURING
Credentials do not equal competence
“Work on whatever interests you the most. You'll work much harder on something you're interested in than something you're doing because you think you're supposed to. Don't try to guess whether gene editing or LLMs or rockets will turn out to be the most valuable technology to know about. No one can predict that.”
Creativity & Innovation · Psychology & Behavior · Strategy & Decision Making
DUR_ENDURING
Interest drives effort more than prediction
“Steve Wozniak just wanted to build his own computer. It only turned into a company when Steve Jobs said 'Hey, I wonder if we could sell plans for this computer to other people.' That's how Apple started. They weren't even selling computers, just plans for computers. Can you imagine how lame this company seemed?”
Business & Entrepreneurship · Creativity & Innovation
DUR_ENDURING
Project became company accidentally
“It really matters to do well in your classes, even the ones that are just memorization or blathering about literature, because you need to do well in your classes to get into a good university. And if you want to start a startup you should try to get into the best university you can, because that's where the best cofounders are. It's also where the best employees are.”
Leadership & Management · Business & Entrepreneurship
DUR_ENDURING
Universities concentrate talent for hiring
“You find cofounders by working on projects with them. What you need in a cofounder is someone who's good at what they do and that you work well with, and the only way to judge this is to work with them on things.”
Leadership & Management · Business & Entrepreneurship
DUR_ENDURING
Test cofounders through shared work
“Don't feel like your projects have to be serious. They can be as frivolous as you like, so long as you're building things you're excited about. Probably 90% of programmers start out building games. They and their friends like to play games. So they build the kind of things they and their friends want.”
Creativity & Innovation · Psychology & Behavior
DUR_ENDURING
Frivolous projects teach serious skills
Frameworks (1)
Project-Based Skill Acquisition
How to learn by building
Master any technology by working on self-directed projects that solve problems you personally care about. Need-driven learning accelerates skill acquisition because each roadblock becomes immediate motivation to learn. Build things for yourself and friends, starting with whatever interests you most, regardless of perceived seriousness or market value.
Components
- Choose Based on Interest
- Build for Yourself and Peers
- Embrace Need-Driven Learning
Prerequisites
- Access to tools/resources for chosen domain
- Time for sustained practice
Success Indicators
- Building increasingly complex projects
- Solving problems independently
- Friends actually using what you build
Failure Modes
- Switching projects too frequently
- Building for hypothetical users
- Getting stuck in tutorial loops
Mental Models (1)
Interest-Driven Selection
Decision MakingWhen facing multiple options with unpredictable outcomes, choose based on intrinsic interest.
In Practice: Core principle for choosing which technology to learn
Demonstrated by Leg-pg-001
Connective Tissue (3)
Medieval manuscript calligraphy
Steve Jobs studied calligraphy as a teenager with no career intent, just interest. This knowledge became a decisive competitive advantage when the Macintosh needed to display book-quality typography. Apple destroyed competitors at graphic design because Jobs was one of the few tech leaders who understood visual aesthetics at a deep level. The cross-domain knowledge from an ancient art form created differentiation in a modern technology product.
Used as example of how following interest in seemingly irrelevant domains creates unexpected competitive advantages
Carpenter seeing sticking door as fixable
A shop has a door that sticks. To the shop owners it's a mysterious natural phenomenon requiring a warning sign. To a carpenter, the solution is obvious: plane off the part that sticks. This illustrates how expertise makes fixable problems visible. Once you're good at programming, missing software becomes as obvious as a sticking door to a carpenter. The same pattern applies across all domains: expertise reveals opportunity gaps that others accept as unchangeable reality.
Used as analogy for how technical expertise makes startup opportunities visible
University admissions as selection filter
Elite universities function as talent concentration mechanisms not because of teaching quality or prestige, but because of selection difficulty. The harder it is to get in, the more the entering class is filtered for intelligence and determination. Paradoxically, arbitrary admissions hoops select better for startup founders than purely academic filters would, because arbitrary tests measure determination and resourcefulness, the two most critical founder qualities. This is a biological filtering mechanism: environmental pressure selects for specific traits.
Explanation of why elite universities produce more successful startups
Key Figures (4)
Larry Page and Sergey Brin
4 mentionsCo-founders of Google
Steve Jobs
3 mentionsCo-founder of Apple
Used as example of how following curiosity in calligraphy created competitive advantage in technology design, and how projects become companies accidentally
- Studied calligraphy as teenager with no career intent, which later gave Apple decisive advantage in Macintosh typography and graphic design
- Saw commercial potential in Wozniak's personal computer project and suggested selling plans, transforming project into company
Mark Zuckerberg
2 mentionsFounder of Facebook
Steve Wozniak
1 mentionsCo-founder of Apple, Engineer
Glossary (1)
calligraphy
VOCABULARYDecorative handwriting or handwritten lettering, especially the ornate style found in medieval manuscripts
“Steve Jobs spent time when he was a teenager studying calligraphy, the sort of beautiful writing that you see in medieval manuscripts.”
Key People (5)
Steve Jobs
(1955–2011)Co-founder and CEO of Apple, pioneer of personal computing
Mark Zuckerberg
(1984–)Founder and CEO of Facebook (Meta)
Steve Wozniak
(1950–)Co-founder of Apple
Larry Page
(1973–)Co-founder of Google
Sergey Brin
(1973–)Co-founder of Google
Synthesis
Synthesis
Migrated from Scholia